This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Nature writing has always been a little unsatisfying to me, I’ll admit. Unlike our relationships with other humans, which are tinged with friction and love and all the other ingredients of drama, our encounters with the natural world seemed fairly static. Nature exists out there: We walk through it, we enjoy its beauty, we sometimes feel its indiscriminate wrath.

I’m going to miss The Crown. At its best, it has been alternately soothing, nostalgic, and educational, and even at its worst, it has always been well acted and gorgeous.Unfortunately, the second half of the sixth and final season is very much The Crown at its worst.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here.Artificial intelligence is changing the way some scientists conduct research, leading to new discoveries on accelerated timetables.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Ozempic broke out in a big way this year. By the time Jimmy Kimmel made a crack at the Oscars about the medication, bringing it a new surge of national attention, diabetes and obesity drugs that suppress appetite had been on the rise for months.

Within the first five seconds of a recent Ozempic commercial, a sky-blue injector pen tumbles toward the viewer, encircled by a big red O. Obesity drugs have become so closely associated with injections that the two are virtually synonymous. Like Ozempic, whose name is now a catchall term for obesity drugs, Wegovy and Zepbound come packaged in Sharpie-like injection pens that patients self-administer once a week.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea. Sign up here.Not so long ago, an Atlantic writer set out to defend the former president, a notorious liar with a knack for escaping jams—and one who derived an unseemly joy from impunity. Hand-wringing about this sort of behavior, Roy Blount Jr.

In the spring of 1994, the top executives of the seven largest tobacco companies testified under oath before Congress that nicotine is not addictive. Nearly 30 years later, Americans remember their laughable claims, their callous indifference, their lawyerly inability to speak plainly, and the general sense that they did not regard themselves as part of a shared American community. Those pampered executives, behaving with such Olympian detachment, put the pejorative big in Big Tobacco.